Lucius Richard Peter Strochwacker was born in 1867 in Priapus, New York, the only son of Mary and Ezekiel Strochwacker. His parents were both founders of the Society of Solipsists, a religious group whose devotees believed that no one existed except one’s own self. Naturally, meetings were contentious. In this lively atmosphere young Lucius grew up, steeped in the debates of the age: Is there a God? Well, where is He, then? In the cupboard? This cupboard? What, he’s in the jam jar? Why the hell did I marry you? The influence of these heady debates cannot be underestimated.
At the age of 16, young Lucius was dealt a cruel blow. En route to court a young lady, he was flung from his horse and impaled on a statue of Cupid. Doctors were compelled to remove much of his lap, including his private organs, thus condemning him to a life of celibacy. Some men might have withdrawn after such an event, but it seemed to fill Lucius with new fury. He became fixated on what he saw as the prime corruptor of the modern age: Irony.

Why a Cupid-gelded man of Priapus who went by the simple name of Dick Peter Strochwacker should fixate on the concept of irony is something biographers have never ascertained. A chance conversation with a stranger? A tract pressed into his hand by some itinerant advocate? The sight of his girlfriend marrying a sculptor of Cupid statuary? Conjecture is all we have. But from 1887 on, we know that Strochwacker was a man possessed, a man on fire, a man whose brain crawled with so many notions and ideas he could barely sleep. What possessed him? Head lice, it turned out. Kerosene treatments were employed. But from 1889 on, Lucius had a cause. He believed that things ought to be regarded exactly as they present themselves; any conjecture of additional meanings ran contrary to the nature of the thing you observed. He called this philosophy "Luciousopticism," and spent several years promoting it, refining it, and mostly spelling it over and over again to people who didn’t get it the first time. He eventually renamed the discipline “Magnetic Realitism.” To quote from his first great work, "Realitism and Tomorrow:"

If a thing is what a thing is, then that is the thing that the thing must be. Looking behind a thing to discover something else - another thing, a cluster of things, several small red things with tails and odd scabs - not only goes contrary to the nature of the thing, but presupposes the existence of a thing that is not within the thing at all. First impressions strike the eye with lusty, swelling, eye-poking empurpled vigor; second impressions & speculative conjectures are invariably timid, slack, nervous, prone to Rosicrutian heresies. If a picture shows a woman who smiles, then she is happy! If a song is in a major key, then it is merry! If a man thrusts his fists into his pants pockets, then he means to grip his fecund orbs and manly lance! All things are as they seem. They wouldn’t sell trousers with a fly in front to a man with no penis, would they? It would be idiocy to suppose they did.

The basics of his later theories are there; they need but the smelting of time. When Realitism did not ignite as Lucius thought, he founded a new organization: The Society for the Extirpation of Godless Double Meanings, By Christ. It attracted five members, which pleased Lucius to no end. “Five!” he cried. “Let’s see that rosey-crossy stone-chipper claim he has five members! I’d wager he barely has but one!” (It is not known what exactly he meant by this.) One of these adherents to modified Realitism was Bob Doff Johnson, perhaps the second most important figure in the Institute’s history. He shared a bond with Lucius that neither man ever deigned to explain, but more importantly, he recognized the commercial potential of Realitism. As he put it in his memoirs, “Memoirs of Bob Doff Johnson” (private collection; unpublished):

I realized there was a great market for some sort of tonic that help people see things clearly, and make them feel better, providing it was composed mostly of cocaine.

Lucius went to work on the tonic, throwing himself into studies of human chemistry. Along the way he made a startling discovery: human blood chemistry changes ever so slightly when the brain creates an additional meaning to supplement the visual information supplied by the eyes. It was, literally, the discovery of Irony in its chemical form.

Once isolated, Irony needed only to be blocked, or counteracted. It would take immense resources, but Lucius had inherited a princely sum. He sought the best minds of Europe and America, bringing them to a scientific establishment he called the Society for Magnetic Realitism. This early ad from 1901 shows that Lucius has already begun to fuse his twin obsessions, Irony and commerce:

By the time of his death in 1929, Lucius was worth over 40 millions. He bequeathed half the money to the Institute, and commanded the rest to be spent on 200-story tower in his home town of Priapus, named after him. Unfortunately, Priapus had disbanded by the late 20s, and was swallowed by the adjacent town of Unicha; the executors of the estate seized on this technicality to invalidate the plan and commit the entire fortune to the Institute.

But his legacy and ideas lived on, and stimulated the Institute's most fertile era. (Oddly enough, it coincided with the rise and domination of mass-media culture.) Lucius had been constantly amazed that men who had never experienced a double-edged reaction could be stirred to dissolute irony by the mere sight of certain advertisements in the daily journals. Before his death, he had speculating that there might there be an irony-producing component to the ink. Was the very blood of the commercial medium infected?

It was indeed, and in 1933 Institute scientists developed a means to extract irony from the printed image, thereby assuring it would never infect the viewer. The technology languished in the Depression years, but when World War Two struck, the Government took a keen interest in the Institute’s machinery. Contracts were drawn up; plants were built. Nearly every printed public document in the 40s came from machines equipped with Institute Extractors. FDR himself credited the Institute’s savvy with making the Soviet alliance palatable to the American people.

The postwar years, however, were hard. Much of the public seemed to reject irony on its own. While the Institute still prospered, it was beginning to lose its way. A shift to computerization in the early 60s prepared the Institute to face the needs of the future. But none of the machines could predict what happened next.

Slowly, gradually, inexorably, irony became desirable. Years before, Bob D. Johnson - aged, but now the Institute’s head - had warned of the dangers of performers such as Mort Sahl, who made irony attractive to post-war intellectual circles. (Johnson, by now a disengaged and delusional figure living in the top floor of the Wichita Hilton, would later attempt to have Sahl assassinated with an exploding newspaper.) Other media influences employed irony with a bright brisk sneer, and suddenly the Institute found itself faced with a culture it could not repair. Government contracts expired on Aug 8, 1973, and were not renewed. The once-busy campus of the Institute emptied out, tended only by acolytes who watched in horror as the culture became drenched in irony.

The Institute might have passed from human memory, save for a moment in late 1983, when Cal Fitzman, one of the Board of Directors, read the results of a survey on Ironic attitudes. “I’ve polled the American people, he said, adding after a pause, “and you know how painful that can be.”

There was silence. A long, horrified silence -

And then the room exploded in laughter.

Mr. Fitzman had quoted David Letterman, acoylte of the New Irony the kids seemed to enjoy so much, and the Board of Directors of the Institute of Official Cheer had loved it. The Institute would never be the same.

New blood was brought in. Auditors were astonished to find that the Institute controlled nearly 16 million barrels of liquefied irony in underground tanks - enough to re-ironize nearly every single-dimensioned cultural product from 1932 to 1973. The decision was made. The irony extractors were converted into Irony Injectors, and work was begun.
What you see here, at this site, is a small fraction of the Institute’s Labors. Day and night the machinery thunders, drenching the old texts in the irony that gives them meaning. Our work will continue; our work must continue.

And what would Lucius have said? As he said once to his official biographer: “You know, in Hindoo countries, testicles can be regrown by the power of thought. Or so I have been told.”

In that spirit, the Institute lives on.

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